Scar Tissue
by gethsemane342
Summary: At the Quarter Quell, the scars of twenty-four victors begin to ache.


**Disclaimer: I do not own _The Hunger Games trilogy_**

**Rating: for death, mentions of forced prostitution, drug use and self-harm**

Scar Tissue

_**I. Gloss Ludovik**_

He does not even consider allying with Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark.

They take the idea of love for granted, for their own survival rather than what it is, and he hates them for it.

Everyone he's ever loved has left or betrayed him in some way. Even Cashmere.

_**II. Cashmere Ludovik**_

Her clothes are always conservative, even in the Quarter Quell. She wears all her injuries in the arena with complete indifference, even going so far as to compare cuts with her brother, but she never once lets her stomach be seen.

The marks from her Capitol visits have always been private.

_**III. Brutus Igneon**_

The Hunger Games are his home. The one place he has ever felt powerful. The only time he has ever been in control.

It's not the same as it was in his Games because they are, all of them, capable, vicious and experienced killers. His leadership of his group is superficial. The arena dictates their movements. Katniss Everdeen's group takes over the beach. He begins to wish he were somewhere else. That he were back twenty-four years, at his own Games, when everything was right and he was _powerful_.

It is when he kills Chaff, one of the few victors he actually likes, that he wonders what he has done. He killed Chaff because he is in the Games.

Because he had to kill him.

Because he is a game piece rather than a game player.

It aches; it aches more than his realisation that winning the Games gave him no more power than he'd had before the Games. But then, he's always known that the worst injuries are often self-inflicted.

_**IV. Enobaria Fitzwilliam**_

Much like her life since she had her teeth filed, the only person happy to have a normal conversation with her at the Quarter Quell is Brutus.

_**V. Beetee Latier**_

Until the Quarter Quell, when he has no choice, he is a vegetarian because the smell of cooked meat makes him think of electric wire on human skin.

_**VI. Wiress Amper**_

On the third night of her screams, Beetee sits with her in her room. He comforts her. He tells her they are just dreams.

"Just your imagination. Nightmares don't happen in real life."

She looks around her, at the tributes' quarters.

"Mine did."

_**VII. Finnick Odair**_

Finnick spends his years from the Sixty-seventh Hunger Games to the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games as a commodity. He's not the only one but he's the most popular.

He tells himself he's used to it. He tells himself he can't be hurt anymore, that they can keep cutting him but he will no longer bleed.

At the Opening Ceremony, Katniss Everdeen looks at him, sees only one thing he could do with his time, and asks, "Then how do they pay you for the pleasure of your company?"

It stings.

He forgot that fire burns.

_**VIII. Mags Kilman**_

After a long life like hers, from the Hunger Games, to failure to save children, to stroke, everyone agrees that she deserves a quick and painless death.

Her body still twitches with poisonous fog when the hovercraft picks it up.

_**IX. Morris Glass**_

When he dreams, he dreams of the tributes he could not save. He doesn't expect to survive the first day of the Quarter Quell.

_**X. Rina Elam**_

In her Hunger Games, the final tribute threw acid over her as he died, blinding her left eye and giving her partial sight in her right. She doesn't even bother going to training.

_**XI. Paras Etmol**_

The worst thing about the Quarter Quell is that they take his morphling away from him.

_**XII. Seena Decim**_

Every year, the stylists insist on removing her scars. She inflicts them anyway, despite reprimand after reprimand, because she cares more about morphling than about the image she presents to the Capitol. In her moments of lucidity, she even wears shorter clothing, to show off her signs of addiction. Her one, addled, mark of rebellion against the Capitol.

Nevertheless, the only injuries she is ever proud of are the ones that adorn her body as she lies by Peeta Mellark, dying, in the Seventy-fifth Hunger Games.

_**XIII. Blight Smith**_

His hands are calloused in the wrong places as he holds his axe alongside Johanna.

"Missed it?" she asks.

He looks at the jungle that will probably be his tomb and breathes in the humid smell of death.

"Not at all."

"You remember how to use that thing?"

Axes are made for trees, not people, and he has not been a lumberjack for years.

"No."

She looks at him carefully. "Remember how to kill?"

His mind flashes to the family and friends he never sees, in case his rages overwhelm him.

"Yes."

_**XIV. Johanna Mason**_

She walks into the segment filled with jabberjays to get water.

The arena is silent as the grave.

_**XV. Woof Angora**_

His body has been failing him for years. With little hearing, trembling hands, coughs and a mind that often wanders, he nearly laughs when they tell him he has to protect the tributes from District 12 in the Quarter Quell. By the next day, he's forgotten his task.

_**XVI. Cecelia Alder**_

She fights in the initial bloodbath to try to stop the Careers early on, and to distract them from chasing Districts 4 and 12. Enobaria delivers the fatal blow and her final thought is only that she hopes her husband is covering her children's eyes. The death of their mother is likely to scar them for life.

_**XVII. Shew Thean**_

On their final night, he knocks on Holly's door, to wish her luck.

She is crying. He holds her close without saying a word. At the end of the night, he kisses her softly on the mouth.

He killed her older sister in his Games and that's the reason their pre-Games engagement fell apart.

_**XVIII. Holly Levito**_

"What _happened_?"

She looks at the shallow cuts that criss-cross her wrists and thinks longingly of the knife they confiscated when she entered the Training Centre. She summons her trademark, jolly grin.

"I fell."

_**XIX. Anton Bush**_

He looks over the lights of the Capitol and realises that he hasn't danced since his last tribute died, in the Seventy-fourth Games. Because Dema could barely walk and Anton's "talent" had suddenly felt disrespectful.

He begins a slow shuffle, picking up pace, until he's performed several complex dance routines. His heart pounds and his breathing is heavy but he feels _alive_.

Then he remembers all of the dead tributes and how he will be fighting in the Hunger Games in a few days, and he wonders what the hell he was thinking.

_**XX. Lima Tenferris**_

She has never known whether to curse or thank the Capitol patron who mangled her face in such a way that no one has ever asked her to return to the Capitol. At the Quarter Quell, from the usual looks of sympathy and jealousy from other victors, she decides, for the first time, that the answer is the latter.

_**XXI. Chaff Huslin**_

He knows all of the conspirators think his alcoholism and missing hand will make him a burden in the arena.

They're wrong. He's learnt to work around those. It's the deaths of his wife and daughter that he's never gotten over.

_**XXII. Seeder Teff**_

She won her Games by chance. She married young, before the idea of selling Victors really took off, and had had children before the Capitol's eye could turn on her. She lived peacefully. She brought Chaff and Ruta back to the district. She had grandchildren. Many look upon her life as a storybook tale. Even in the Seventy-fifth Games, she cannot avoid the looks of anger that she came out of everything unblemished.

She dies early in the Games and her body drifts away. None of the victors ever sees that across her stomach, down her back, up her legs and around her arms, the names of every tribute in her Games and of every tribute she could not save are scored deeply in ink.

_**XXIII. Peeta Mellark**_

The aches and pains from his last Games haven't faded but they feel minor compared to the horrible realisation that in just a few days, he might lose Katniss Everdeen forever.

_**XXIV. Katniss Everdeen**_

She sleeps quietly in his arms but she knows from Haymitch that nightmares never truly end.

_**Fin**_


End file.
